Blogger comments needs improvement

As I mentioned in my last post, my main gripe with Blogger is their comment system. I am a big fan of people being accountable for their actions/comments. Most people are honest and considerate. But there are a few who hide behind the anonymity of the Internet and sling rude comments, disrupting the experience for others.

Unfortunately, the only way to dissuade this behavior is to require people to create an account and sign in to post a comment. I don't feel that this is a very good solution, because that's just one more login and password for you to remember.

About a year ago, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect were created to be your personal centralized identity that you can use to log into any sites that choose to adopt the technology. I run into sites left and right that have implemented Facebook Connect for their commenting system, but aside from Blogger, I haven't seen Google Friend Connect anywhere else.

Google/Blogger was one of the first to embrace OpenID, and I applaud them for that. But what about allowing comments for users of other popular systems that tie an identity to that person, such as Twitter, MySpace, and most importantly Facebook Connect?

Over the past couple weeks that I have been considering switching back to Blogger from a self-hosted Wordpress site, I have investigated options that allow this kind of freedom. So far, I have found only two that are worth mentioning...

DISQUS is free. Their system allows visitors to your site to choose to leave a comment with their Facebook, OpenID, Twitter, or DISQUS identity. Nearly everyone is going to recognize what Facebook and Twitter is, but who in the heck (besides the tech savvy) is going to know what OpenID or DISQUS is? Probably not many, and that's why I won't be implementing DISQUS into my site.

JS-Kit ECHO is not free, but they appear to be on the right track. ECHO allows visitors to choose from several identities, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, and several others. They also allow the visitor to subscribe to the comments thread, include images and video, and also re-post their comment to their personal site (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) if they choose to do so. These features can all be enabled or disabled as desired. The fee for this service is $12 per year.

I am considering JS-Kit ECHO for my blogger comments. It is a nice system and offers a lot of flexibility. They have a 30-day full refund policy if you aren't satisfied, but would much more prefer a 15-30 day free trial instead to see if I want to purchase it.

That said, if Google would just add Facebook Connect as an identity option for posting comments, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

I'm back on Blogger

After switching back to my self-hosted Wordpress site for the past year, I have decided to hang that up and come back to Blogger. Maintaining a self-hosted blog has a lot of benefits. You have so much more flexibility with what you can do with your site.

But it's a lot of work to maintain. You have to perform upgrades to the software, and do regular backups of the site and databases. If you want to switch themes then you have to make sure that any extra code that you have added is copied into the new template. I just decided that I wanted something simpler that I can focus on writing instead of maintaining the site.

Blogger has come quite a ways. I like that you can now easily use photos from your Picasa album. The one thing that I am going to miss is the ability to use Facebook Connect to allow Facebook users to leave comments via their Facebook account. I know that Google has their Google Friend Connect, and I like it... but I hope that they consider adding Facebook Connect as a means to leave comments and subscribe to a Blogger site.

A lot has happened since my last post. I'll provide details soon.

Switched From Wordpress To Blogger

Google sure doesn't seem to want to make it easy for Wordpress users to switch to Blogger.

I just went through the tedious process of copying and pasting all of the posts from my self-hosted Wordpress blog over to this Blogger blog. As expected, several posts will need to be fixed where a Wordpress plugin was used, but I've got the frustrating part done now by manually copying all of my posts over.

Google really needs to make it a high priority to create an import tool that imports blog exports from Wordpress, TypePad, and other competitors if they want people to switch. I have read comments from several others wanting to switch from Wordpress to Blogger, but Blogger's lack of a tool to import Wordpress exports is preventing them from doing so. I should be able to export my blog from any blog service and import it into any other blog service. It should be portable and easy to switch. Instead, it is anything but.

I will probably point my personal URL to this blog in a week or so and then get rid of Wordpress and cancel my hosted service.